Rehabilitating an attrited language in a bilingual person with aphasia

Clin Linguist Phon. 2022 Apr 26:1-19. doi: 10.1080/02699206.2022.2052966. Online ahead of print.ABSTRACTLanguage difficulties can arise from reduced exposure to any given language (e.g. attrition) or after brain damage (e.g. aphasia). The manifestations of attrition and aphasia are often similar so differentiating between their effects on language loss and recovery is challenging. We investigated treatment effects for an English-Hebrew bilingual person with stroke-induced aphasia who had minimal contact with his Hebrew for over 14 years. We asked whether his attrited language could be rehabilitated, how effects of attrition and aphasia can be dissociated, and how such dissociation aids our understanding of the mechanisms involved in language recovery in aphasia. We administered a verb-based semantic treatment in Hebrew three times a week for six weeks (totalling 29 hours of therapy) and assessed changes in both Hebrew and English comprehension and production abilities across a variety of language tasks. Quantitative analyses demonstrated improvement in Hebrew production across language tasks, including those involving lexical retrieval processes that were trained during treatment. Improvement to English occurred in these same lexical retrieval tasks only. We interpret these results as indicating that the participant's attrited language (Hebrew) could be rehabilitated with both specific treatment and general exposure to Hebrew contributing to improvement. Furthermore, treatmen...
Source: Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Source Type: research